"You hear me talking, hillbilly boy?"

I finally got around to cataloging my DVD collection, found something quite disturbing and it's not the Bewitched SE/TV Sampler combo pack.

Well, that's disturbing too; but on a whole other level that I'm not prepared to share outside the comfort of the therapist/patient relationship.

The real dilemma is I own a lot of fullscreen DVDs. I must have on the order of 10-12 of those piece o' crap, pan 'n' scan, 1.33:1 aspect ratio discs that people buy because "whineI don't like the black bars on the screenwhine," and that's just too many. I'm an early adopter. I've had 16:9 HDTV with progressive scan DVD for a loooooong time now. I've never knowingly purchased anything other than letterboxed movies, even on VHS.

Anyway, there are some of these DVDs that are easily explained, like older, less popular movies where the studios took the cleanest copy they had and burned it to a disc with a menu. I can live with that. At least I can watch the film.

But I have some that I simply shouldn't. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for one. The Bourne Identity is another. I can't fathom how I could walk out of a video store with this format, short of my family being held at gunpoint. So that leaves one viable explanation...

Someone broke into my apartment and replaced my widescreen editions with the fullscreen variety!

I'm working on a list of suspects, and I don't think it will be too difficult to narrow down. The perpetrator only needs to exhibit these few characteristics:

1. They must know where I live.
2. They must have the list of movies that I own.
3. They must have already purchased these movies in their fullscreen version.
4. They must have subsequently had a change of heart concerning their prior purchase.
5. They must have just enough conscience to make the switch and still leave all my other possessions untouched.

Now I can't imagine there are more than 20 or 30 people that fit that profile, so I should make short work of this. And when I found out who's responsible? Oooh hoo hoo...

I'm going to call a couple of hard pipe-hitting niggers to go to work on the homes here with a pair of pliers and a blow torch.

Never to be one without a plan "B", I will have to decide whether to repurchase these discs in the correct format, assuming I can't recover them via medieval means. I may leave that decision to any of the readers I've managed to garner through my guerilla ad campaign.

That is all. Maybe I'll find something new to bitch about tomorrow.